ml_hardware

Looks like someone has got DBRX running on an M2 Ultra already: https://x.com/awnihannun/status/1773024954667184196?s=20

Mosaic's MPT models are already supported in GGML: https://github.com/ggerganov/ggml

Here's MPT-30B running in 4-bit precision on CPU :) https://twitter.com/abacaj/status/1673133443339763712?s=20

The repo for training and finetuning this model is open source here: https://github.com/mosaicml/llm-foundry

Did you actually read the blog? The very first sentence is:

Try out our Stable Diffusion code here! https://github.com/mosaicml/diffusion-benchmark

I think it depends what downstream task you're trying to do... DeepMind tried distilling big language models into smaller ones (think 7B -> 1B) but it didn't work too well... it definitely lost a lot of quality (for general language modeling) relative to the original model.

See the paper here, Figure A28: https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/b068c6c0e64d6f93...

But if your downstream task is simple, like sequence classification, then it may be possible to compress the model without losing much quality.

I agree! The models will definitely keep getting bigger, and MoEs are a part of that trend, sorry if that wasn’t clear.

A pod of gen2-H100s might have 256 GPUs with 40 TB of total memory, and could easily run a 10T param model. So I think we are far from diminishing returns on the hardware side :) The model quality also continues to get better at scale.

Re. reading material, I would take a look at DeepSpeed’s blog posts (not affiliated btw). That team is super super good at hardware+software optimization for ML. See their post on MoE models here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/deepspeed-adva...

The 9x speedup is a bit inflated... it's measured at a reference point of ~8k GPUs, on a workload that the A100 cluster is particularly bad at.

When measured at smaller #s of GPUs which are more realistic, the speedup is somewhere between 3.5x - 6x. See the GTC Keynote video at 38:50: https://youtu.be/39ubNuxnrK8?t=2330

Based on hardware specs alone, I think that training transformers with FP8 on H100 systems vs. FP16 on A100 systems should only be 3-4x faster. Definitely looking forward to external benchmarks over the coming months...

Couple points:

1) NVIDIA will likely release a variant of H100 with 2x memory, so we may not even have to wait a generation. They did this for V100-16GB/32GB and A100-40GB/80GB.

2) In a generation or two, the SOTA model architecture will change, so it will be hard to predict the memory reqs... even today, for a fixed train+inference budget, it is much better to train Mixture-Of-Experts (MoE) models, and even NVIDIA advertises MoE models on their H100 page.

MoEs are more efficient in compute, but occupy a lot more memory at runtime. To run an MoE with GPT3-like quality, you probably need to occupy a full 8xH100 box, or even several boxes. So your min-inference-hardware has gone up, but your efficiency will be much better (much higher queries/sec than GPT3 on the same system).

So it's complicated!

At inference time it will be possible to do 4000 TFLOPS using sparse FP8 :)

But keep in mind the model won't fit on a single H100 (80GB) because it's 175B params, and ~90GB even with sparse FP8 model weights, and then more needed for live activation memory. So you'll still want atleast 2+ H100s to run inference, and more realistically you would rent a 8xH100 cloud instance.

But yeah the latency will be insanely fast given how massive these models are!

Unfortunately it will be hard to investigate properties of large, powerful neural networks without access to their trained weights. And industrial labs that spend millions of dollars training them will not be keen to share.

If academics want to do research on expensive cutting-edge tech, they will have to join industrial labs or pool together resources, similar to particle physics or drug discovery research today.

You may find this blog post useful for thinking about AI scaling: https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/k2SNji3jXaLGhBeYP/extra...

For general tasks like language modeling, we are still seeing predictable improvements (on the next-token-prediction loss) with increasing compute. We will very likely be able to scale things up by 10,000x or so and continue to see increasing performance.

But what does this mean for end users? We are probably going to see sigmoid-like curves, where qualitative features of these models (like being able to do math, or tell jokes, or tutor you in French, or provide therapy, or mediate international conflicts) will suddenly get a * lot * better at some point in the scaling curve. We saw this for simple arithmetic in the GPT-3 paper, where the small <1B param models were terrible at it, and then with 100B scale suddenly the model could do arithmetic with 80%+ accuracy.

Personally I would not expect diminishing returns with increased scale, instead there will be sudden leaps in ability that will be very economically valuable. And that is why Meta and others are so interested in scaling up these models.

"Though the spike seen in the data generates more questions than answers, one thing is clear: A single (albeit large and busy) store’s decision to report a majority of its shoplifting incidents doubled the entire city’s monthly shoplifting rates."

Wow! How are you able to achieve the cost reductions? Is it different hardware, software optimizations, or both? Also does this suggest that OpenAI is charging 6x markups on their models... >:(

I was providing costs for the exact instance types that NeuralMagic used in their blog post, if we’re allowed to change that then I can also find cheaper GPU providers.

I can agree with you that on super, super small inference deployments, maybe you can lower monthly spend by using CPUs. But i must ask.. who is the target customer that is both spending <$100 / month and also trying to optimize this? I feel like big players will have big workloads that will be most cost-effective on GPUs.

That's true.. in fact, seeing V100 FP16 < T4 FP16 makes me believe you're right, the V100 should be much faster if the tensor cores were being used.

T4 is a gpu :) NVIDIA Tesla T4: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/tesla-t4/

My guess is they are using tensor cores as they report FP16 throughput, but they seem to be measuring at batch size 1, which is hugely unfair to the GPUs.

For inference workloads you usually batch incoming requests together and run once on GPU (though this increases latency). A latency/throughput tradeoff curve at different batch sizes would tell the whole story.

Also, they are using INT8 on CPU and neglect to measure the same on GPU. All the GPU throughputs would 2x.

tl;dr just use GPUs

Edit: to the comments below, I agree low-latency can be important to some workloads, but that's exactly why I think we need to see a latency-throughput tradeoff curve.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that modern GPUs (A10/A30/A40/A100) basically dominate CPUs even when latency is constrained, and the MLPerf results give a good (fair!) comparison of this:

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/extending-nvidia-performan...

The GPU throughputs are much, much higher than the CPU ones, and I don't think even NM's software can overcome this gap. Not to mention they degrade the model quality...

The last question is whether CPUs are more cost-effective despite being slower, and the answer is still... no. The instances used in this blog post cost:

- C5 CPU (c5.12xlarge): $2.04/hr - T4 GPU (g4dn.2xlarge): $0.752/hr

NM's best result @ batch-size-1 costs more, at lower throughput, at lower model quality, at ~same latency, than a last-gen GPU operating at half it's capacity. A new A10 GPU using INT8 will widen the perf/$ gap by another ~4x.

Also full disclosure I don't work at NVIDIA or anything like that so I'm not trying to shill :) I just like ML hardware a lot and want to help people make fair comparisons.

I think your math is backwards. The training workload W is the same, and the time to complete it is:

W / (256 * speed_v4) = 1.82

W / (4096 * speed_v3) = 0.39

speed_v4 / speed_v3 = (4096 * 0.39) / (256 * 1.82) = 3.43

Note that this assumes that training speed is perfectly linear with the # of accelerators which is not true as you get to very large #s (like 4096!). So the true number should be smaller than the 3.43x above, and the reported 2.7x makes sense.

Haven't seen this mentioned yet, but ResNet-50 is an old model. I would probably expect multiple-percentage-point gains from using a better (or honestly just larger) architecture and better training methodology.

Throw an ML engineer at this task and you could probably do * way * better than 72%.

GPT3 can write correct computer programs. There are many demos online.

Stepping back it is just a translation problem e.g. English idea -> Python code, which an ideal language model would be able to do.

I think what I’m picking a gripe over is that “language model” is a very general term. Calling GPT3 just a language model is like calling a human just a bunch of atoms. It’s not actually limiting.

What I’d love to talk about is how useful of a language model is GPT3? And how useful do you think GPT4, 5, etc. are going to be?

If you had a language model whose responses were indistinguishable from a human, would you call that understanding?

I agree GPT-3 is * just * a language model, but then again, so are you.

I've done a lot of work in ML numerics, and I think TF32 is a completely safe drop-in for FP32 for ML workloads. NVIDIA seems to think so too, which is why on A100 it won't even be an option, it will be the default mode for any FP32 matrix multiplies.

But on 3090, I don't think the speedup will be 5x, it should be closer to like 2x. The 3090 has 35.6 TF/s at TF32 and the Titan RTX has 16.3 TF/s at FP32. Once again I think there is handicapping going on for 3090.

If I may ask, why are the Inception style workloads still popular, rather than architectures like EfficientNet?

Also, why FP32? CNNs are some of the most robust models to train in FP16 (much easier than language models) so you could get yourself a quick XXX speedup and 2x memory savings by switching over.

(btw not intending to be accusatory or anything, I just think FP16 training deserves a lot more adoption that it currently seems to have :)

Totally agree! I think 3090 could be a lot more cost effective for researchers to dabble with NLP. But it really grinds my gears when people post these misleading benchmarks... the 3090 is handicapped at half-rate tensor core performance while the Titan RTX is not.

So if you're someone who does their work mainly in FP32, you will see improved performance with the 3090. On the other hand, if you are an FP16 speed demon who needs to train GPT-3 over the weekend, stick with your Titans :)

This is a poor comparison of performance. All of these networks are CNNs, and very old architectures at that. They are all probably memory bottlenecked which is why you see the consistent 50% improvement in FP32 perf.

It is also not clear what batch sizes are being used for any of the tests. If you switch to FP16 training, you must increase the batch size to properly utilize the Tensor Cores.

If you compare these cards at FP16 performance on large language models (think GPT-style with large model dimension), I am confident you will see Titan RTX outperform the 3090. The former has 130 TF/s of FP16.32 tensor core performance while the latter has only 70 TF/s.

Link: https://www.nvidia.com/content/dam/en-zz/Solutions/geforce/a...

Do you have a link to those results by independent researchers? I have also been very skeptical of GraphCore’s claims (and have talked about it on reddit) but haven’t had access or heard of anyone’s experience.

It's not that impressive.. The NVIDIA A100 has better efficiency: 312 TFlops @ 400W for the same precision (FP16.32).